Topic: DNS seems down

[Ters]

For over 12 hours now, I can not access simutrans.com or any of its subdomains through normal DNS lookup. Only by obtaining the IP by contacting the nameservers listed in the whois directly and putting that into the hosts file am I able to visit this site. Since there seems to be a drop in activity, I guess I'm not alone. I do however notice that a couple of others have manager to get here as well, but whether that means that part of the Internet is at fault for not knowing of simutrans.com or whether part of the Internet is at fault for not knowing that simutrans.com is not supposed to work anymore, is not certain to me.

[jamespetts]

Having been down, it now (in the last few minutes) seems to be back.

[Ters]

It still looks broken to me. You are just one of the few that still seems to be able to get here. Just look at the posts the last two days or so. It is mostly you, with a few posts by me, prissi, River and some other person. How you guys get in, I can not tell. Perhaps your local DNS servers have a very long duration cache, as I doubt most of you have hardcoded the IP address of this site into your computer like I have.

[TurfIt]

Domain Name: SIMUTRANS.COM
Domain Status: clientHold
                           ^^^^^ somebody didn't pay the bill?

hardcoding the IP is the only way I can get here, DNS down for 3-4 days now.

[Ters]

Given the creation date and the expiration date, I would not have expected that to be an issue at this time of year, since I've only seen prices for a year. I don't know who is responsible for the top domain. There has been talk of changing who is responsible. Maybe that went wrong.

[z9999+]

Is whois email address correct and reachable ?
Maybe administrator didn't response to the email from registrar.

[Ters]

Is whois email address correct and reachable ?
Maybe administrator didn't response to the email from registrar.

Ashley requested that the whois information be updated just over a month ago because it was outdated, including on who was responsible. Prissi replied that it had been done a year ago, but that he would try again to get it updated. I don't know if what is in the whois now is the same that was there then, although the DNS servers listed now are not the same as they were yesterday and the update date changes almost daily.

Update:
Now the whois is updated again, with a third set of name servers. Contacting them directly still gives the same IP for simutrans.com, but they don't know of the subdomains.
And the German forum has now picked up on this. It doesn't appear they know more than us.

[Ters]

Now it is back to one of the previous sets of name servers, but the forum has moved to a completely different IP. So someone is clearly doing something, but I am baffled as to what and why.

[z9999+]

Please inform us current status and future plan to recover simutrans.com, at public channel.

[Ters]

Seems like we're over on forum.simutrans.org, now. Which so far isn't working either, but at least the domain simutrans.org is, so there is hope I guess.

[z9999+]

Quote from http://steamcommunity.com/app/434520/discussions/0/350540780278289213/

Ok, an update: The change of nameserver on Firday triggered a email check from ICANN that this was ok and the domain did not got hijacked. However, since I took over the domains from Timothy two years ago, every attempt from my side to change the domian holder record to my address failed. Since at that time it did not cause any troubles, I left it at that.

But now the email verification failed and hence simutrans.com is suspended by ICANN. Since inside the forum "fourm.simutrans.com" is used (and simutrans.org forwarded to simutrans.com), simutrans.org and serverlist works, while simutrans.com is suspended. The server works and by editing your hosts file one can even access the forum.

So I expect that my domainhoster sorts this out on Monday.

[Isaac.Eiland-Hall]

Temporarily, I have the forum on http://forum.simutrans.space/

Also http://forum.simutrans.space/index.php?topic=15710.new#new